Dr. Jeff Harries is a PITO Local Physician Champion, Community of Practice (CoP) physician lead, Practice Support Program (PSP) Physician Champion - a physician with an MBA and natural tendency toward leadership and innovation.
In 2007, Dr. Harries saw a short window of opportunity to encourage his colleagues in the South Okanagan to adopt the same EMR product to facilitate peer support, ease mobility for locums, staff, and on-call coverage, and help to get toward electronic referrals (eReferrals) which he saw as key to improving continuity of care and getting the specialists involved.
Dr. Harries worked with his peers in the local community and formed a physician selection committee and formed the "South Okanagan One EMR" initiative. This community approach, already used successfully in several other places in Canada and around the world, quickly blossomed into a whole program within PITO that became known as the Community of Practice program and Dr. Harries was joined by 17 colleagues around province who saw merit in his model and wanted to take the same approach in their community.
Dr. Jeff Harries was interviewed by Dr. Alan Brookstone on February 5th regarding EMRs and the Community of Practice approach to EMR adoption. See Podcast: Implementing and Using an EMR in a Community of Practice on the Canadiam EMR blog.